Ultrasound Results, Heavenly Bodies, and Off We Go A-Cruisin

Okay, I'm sorry this took so long, but we've been a bit busy.

The ultrasound, and accompanying blood tests, came out perfect. We went in with about a 1 in 100 chance of Downs and such, based on our age, and when the results were in we were at about 1 in 2000. We got some good views of the baby, though once again I was unable to be in the room. This is my fave: alien baby. I tell everybody it has my hairline.

Last night I lucked into getting some shots of the moon, Venus, and Jupiter in close proximity in the sky. I had read a few days ago about them being close, but the weather has been unfavorable. Luckily last evening it cleared up for a while and I was able to get a view around dusk. This shot was taken hand-held with a fast exposure to get some lunar surface detail and minimize halos. It came out okay, but I wish I'd had my tripod handy. If you got shots of this phenomenon too, post a comment with a link. Click it for a somewhat larger view.

Tomorrow we are leaving to go on a cruise in the Bahamas. It's a Disney cruise, perpetrated by my Disney-obsessed sister in law, so one of the ports-of-call will be their private island with its manufactured beach, scenery, and entertainments. I believe we'll be stopping at another island as well with real stuff to see. I'm not sure how the weather will be. We were signed up for snorkling and such but a bit of research has revealed an average water temperature in the mid 70s this time of year so we've canceled that. I guess we'll just do a bit of biking and lounging. In any case I'll try to take pictures, and if my phone miraculously works I may post one or two from there. We'll be back Monday.

A Mishap At Saturn

Some years ago, a good decade now that I think of it, I bought a program that I very much enjoyed: Microsoft Space Simulator. It was very cool for its time, particularly for a DOS program as you can see from these screen shots. It's been a while since I've run it. I may still have it stashed away, but I really can't remember if I got it on 3.5" or 5.25" floppies. My current computer has neither so the point is moot. (For now, anyway - I plan to snag one off of an older system before I junk it.)

So, curious to see if Microsoft has followed up with a version that can take advantage of modern computers, I did a search. I didn't find an updated version, but I did find mention of Orbiter.

Orbiter is a freeware space flight simulator that looks a lot nicer than MS Space Simulator, as you can see from its screen shots. Unfortunately, it, or my computer, has a problem. When I tried to load the Saturn scenario from the demo section it instantly reset and rebooted my computer. That's just plain annoying.

I do play to try it again, perhaps with nothing else running, but I would like to hear from other users who have had the same problem with it and hear how they fixed or avoided it.

Anyway, if you haven't seen it, give it a look yourself. It looks pretty cool.

Helpful Things You Can Do On The Internet

Apparently there are several sites on the interweb where a body can sign up to contribute their time to those sites' projects. Here are a few I already knew about or recently heard of, followed by a list of others.

Distributed Proofreaders
I have this on in my blogroll already. Basically it's a site where you can help proofread, one page at a time, scanned and computer-transcribed public-domain texts to be included in the collection of Project Gutenberg. You get to pick from a list of current projects, some of which can really suck you in. (Yes, I have participated in this one.)

Stardust@Home
The Stardust probe traveled to a comet and once there held aloft an extremely light gel block (aerogel, the stuff is called) to gently catch bits of interplanetary & interstellar dust. They then put the aerogel under an automated microscope and took over a million pictures, scanning the position and focus depth along the way. Volunteers scan through the pictures, noting tell-tale signs of dust impacts so that the scientists can retrieve the captured dust for analysis.

Galaxy Zoo
An astronomical photographic survey promises to reveal a good million or more galaxies. The astronomers want to find and classify them all, but while computers are good at finding possible galaxies, they aren't nearly as good as humans at verifying that they are in fact galaxies and noting their characteristics. You can help by looking at the pictures they have gathered and noting whether each is a galaxy, what type, and the direction of rotation for spirals. They say that as a participant you may be the first human to see these galaxies.

And here's a list of others (more details at Distributed Human Projects at distributedcomputing.info)...

• Common Sense Learner
• Distributed Proofreaders Europe
• Project Dolphin
• Twenty Questions
• Open Mind Indoor Common Sense
• BeWeS MouseTracker
• Uptime Project
• The ESP Game
• questsin
• Amazon Mechanical Turk
• Herbaria@home
• systemic

Have fun!